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Ikol Spitzohr
Standartenführer Ikol Spitzohr is a former schoolmaster. His parents had owned a factory in Frankfurt and died when he was still a teenager. He had to sell their factory during the Depression and take a job as a teacher. His strict nature made him disliked by the schoolboys. His childhood friend and longtime crush, Sue, whom he sought to marry since they were young, spurned him for a field hand named Puschel, much to Ikol's disdain. As a result, he began looking to other men for company. When the Nazis came to power, he joined the SS at the urging of his uncle and sole surviving relative, Kurt Hauser, an SS oberstgruppenführer, and because many of his students did as well. Hauser used his influence to give him both the rank of standartenführer and command of some tanks, as this was Ikol's biggest ambition; to be an SS Panzer Corps commander. Ikol cared little for Nazi ideology, instead seeing his newfound authority as simply a means to do whatever he wanted, which annoyed his uncle. In the matter of Jews and other "undesirables," Ikol personally felt no particular dislike of them and indeed had little opinion one way or the other. He secretly felt, also, that rather than killing them, the Nazis, as the supposed embodiment of European moral superiority, ought to be lenient towards them and use them instead as labor or breeding stock. He only ever voiced these opinions to his uncle and to his headstrong adjutant, Sturmbannführer Arnau Belzig, though. Belzig, who disliked Ikol due to suspecting him of liaisons with other men, would later use this sort of talk against him when attempting to compel Oberstgruppenführer Hauser his nephew was unfit for leadership. However his ambition did not match his ability, and while he certainly has a dignity to him and looks like a model officer he is actually both a highly inept leader and not very brave. He had no Iron Cross or any other awards for acts of bravery. He isn't "cowardly" by any means, and yet does little to distinguish himself, and is actually demoted (to hauptsturmführer) later by his uncle for a variety of failures, chief among them being losing a skirmish with some American tankers whilst assisting Heer Hauptmann Braunschweig, resulting in Braunschweig's death and Ikol's own near capture. During the time when he was almost captured, prior to being freed, he was raped by some American soldiers off in the wilderness near the battle before being rescued by his senior Tiger tank commander and most frequent lover, Oberscharführer Diebold "Moptop" Moppentrop (so nicknamed to his his shaggy hairstyle). The incident left him shaken and broken. Diebold got an Iron Cross for rescuing his commanding officer and Ikol was left humiliated before his uncle for the loss of his prized King Tiger, and the death of Braunschweig and the routing of the Heer forces they were supposed to assist. It wasn't a decisive battle for either side, win or lose, but it reflected very badly on Hauser because it was his nephew. Hauser removed him from Panzer duties and transferred him to more conventional SS duties like counterinsurgency, interrogation and enforcing Nazi political doctrine, not wanting his nephew anywhere near a battlefield. Ikol never told anyone besides Diebold that he had been raped by the Americans. Not even (and especially) his uncle. Around this time was when Belzig began dropping hints to Hauser that his faith in his sister's son was sorely misplaced. Hauser ignored him at first, considering Belzig all brawn and no brains (an opinion Ikol shared). Hauser then sent him and Belzig to Greece, to a small seaside town, to deal with some suspected British commando activity. This was both a legitimate mission and a test of Ikol's leadership and crisis handling abilities. It didn't exactly go well. They flew by helicopter with two SS soldiers in order to pick up captured Jewish commando leader Colonel Archibald Gutowski. The problem was the British commandos - aided by partisans and American soldier Sergean John Wolf - were sabotaging German lines and vehicles and also inciting the locals in a test of Allied-backed insurgency operations in a sort of mirror of the resistance in France. Ikol's mission was to stop this and capture or kill the Englishmen. Ikol met strong resistance to any SS presence from the local Heer commanding officer, Hauptmann Arnold Messler, who had worked hard to convince the local Greeks that the Germany army was their friend, and was afraid the notoriously brutal SS would screw everything up. He was able to persuade Hauser to send only his nephew and his nephew's adjutant at first for this reason, insisting his regular army troops could handle the situation. Ikol was initially there only in an advisory/observer position, but things got out of control. They captured Wolf and some of the British but failed to get them to give up the whereabouts of their comrades, and eventually the commandos escaped, freeing Gutowski, taking Ikol prisoner and leaving him tied to a tree in the woods for a night, before Belzig and Hauptmann Messler rescued him the following morning. He was enraged and took command of Messler's men and led an attack against the commandos but their guerrilla tactics threw back the Germans, and an even more pissed Ikol then radioed his uncle to request the dreaded Einsatzkommando, much to Messler's horror. In the end, he had to repeatedly reassure Messler the Einsatzkommando would only be used against the British commandos, and not the Greek civilians. Ultimately, even with some of the SS' most feared and highly trained killers at his direct command, Ikol utterly failed. Although the commandos were slaughtered to a man, their mission to incite the Greeks worked. Unfortunately for the Greeks. Even though Ikol had declared the townspeople hands off when the Einsatzkommando arrived, when news of the rioting reached Oberstgruppenführer Hauser, he was infuriated and ordered them turned against the townsfolk despite Messler's pleas. The town was thoroughly razed, the rioters executed and everyone else displaced to surrounding towns. This was done under Belzig's command, since the same cable giving this order also placed him in command of the present SS troops and Ikol giving a field demotion. He received a full and proper demotion to the rank of hauptsturmführer by his uncle after returning to Germany. Belzig was promoted into his place. Hauptmann Messler only escaped any kind of punishment or blame since Hauser heaped everything on his idiot nephew. Here, finally, the newly promoted Belzig suggests to Hauser that Ikol's problem is his lack of full support for Nazi ideology and in particular his misguided sympathy for the undesirables, which leads to him showing restraint when dealing with them and their acts of rebellion against the Reich's authority. In addition to never fully using any lethal force against them, Ikol also had voiced his dislike of the concentration camps to both his uncle and to Belzig before. This dislike is due both to his squeamishness and his opinion, or lack thereof, of Jews; since he neither likes nor dislikes them he sees no need to kill them. At the suggestion of Hauser, Belzig uses his new authority over Ikol to send him on an errand to the Spriggenfeld concentration camp for some mundane reason. To get its commandant to sign a release order for some laborers or something. The real reason is to expose Ikol to the camp's horrors in the hopes of toughening him up. After being forced by the commandant, Paul Shreck, to shoot a Polish prisoner, Ikol returned and shot Belzig during an RAF air raid. Spitzohr, Ikol Spitzohr, Ikol